Friday, 2 November 2012

Is your Service Desk a SPOC or a SPOF?

One
of ITIL’s benefits is identified as the ‘one language’ to be spoken within IT;
and often people indicate this is an objective at the start of a course (I want
to learn what this ITIL is I keep hearing about) or the benefit obtained at the
end (now I know what the others are talking about). ITIL does introduce a lot
of definitions (have a look at the full glossary-of-terms: 55 pages !) and as a
good methodology should , it also contains a lot of acronyms. So let’s start with explaining
the ones I’ve used in the title:

SPOC
= Single Point of Contact

SPOF
= Single Point of Failure

The
Service Desk is supposed to be the Single-Point-of-Contact for Users on a day-by-day
basic (i.e. for incidents and service requests). Although mistakenly (IMHO,
another acronym although not ITIL-specific) the book reference its primary aim
not so much to be a SPOC but to restore normal service to users (which is the
incident management objective and only part of the service desk’s activities).

The
reason is simply (and mostly well-understood and reasonably implemented in your
average organisation): instead of letting the Users having to hunt around and
find someone in IT who can help him, they can contact the service desk for
anything and everything. From there the correct service process and function
will be engaged. As such it is not only the single, but also the FIRST point of
contact and this makes it very important, if not critical in the perception of
service.

Imagine
company A with you-beaut IT: the latest-and-greatest in desktops, the
latest-and-smallest in laptops, massive fully-redundant internet-pipes ... but
no service desk to speak of. When something goes wrong you, the user, has to
find an IT person and when you finally do, you’ll get a response like ‘yeah,
what do you want ... you touched it didn’t you? ... I don’t have time for that
... I’ll look at it this afternoon, maybe, if I feel like it!’

Company
B on the other hand has IT equipment that is a bit longer in the tooth, not as
powerful or modern. It does break (occasionally) but if it does you can call
the service desk. There your phone-call gets answered within 30 seconds by a
friendly voice who tell you that ‘we are aware there are currently some issues
with the e-mail service and according to the latest information we’ve received
it should be fixed in the next 15 minutes’ (and it is: say what you do – do
what you say).

Now,
I reckon that when it comes to user satisfaction, company B is going to give
company A a run for its money. Not because their IT is better, but their
service is (or at least their service desk). This is the role that the service
desk plays: in the perception of the value of a service. Hence we need to make
sure it is resourced properly and that means not necessarily with junior
technicians (who have to do a tour-of-duty on the service desk before they’re
allowed to touch a server or a piece of network equipment).

After
all, it is the service desk operator which needs to differentiate between user A
and user B calling to tell them their e-mail is not working. On the face of it
two similar incidents, but with user A screaming down the phone that they are a
manager, that it is a disgrace and that they demand someone to fix it ... right
now! However, user A doesn’t actually need e-mail that much for their work (it
could easily be -temporarily- replaced with phone-calls, faxes or
face-to-faces).

This in contrast to user B, who addresses the service desk a
lot politer, almost apologetic for the fact that email is not working and hope
they haven’t caused any trouble. User B actually performs their tasks using
e-mail (for instance receiving orders from clients).

The
service desk not only needs the communication skills to deal with the angry
user A, but also the business-skills to understand the relative impact &
urgency of both user, the service-knowledge (including SLA and service catalogue) to
determine how to respond to this. Any technical skills might help in the initial
diagnosis, but so does the knowledge\known error database.

Without
these skills and the true service attitude (always remember that without IT
most organisations would still exist, but without those organisations most of
us wouldn’t have a job!) your service desk may still be a SPOC, but it might
very well also be a SPOF.

OK, perhaps not a single point of failure but
certainly the first, visible one. And you only get one chance to make a first
impression, and those first impressions are normally what tips the favour in
any satisfaction survey.

1 comment:

Thank you so much for clarifying so much information! I have been looking into using a service desk ITIL but naturally I was a little confused on a few different points. I had been leaning towards the investment but after reding through this information I'm all in. Thanks for the help!